Sought to overturn the Solomon Amendment, a law that denies federal funding to any university that bars military recruiters from its campus

Believes that the military should open its ranks and barracks to homosexuals, without restriction

Was appointed U.S. Solicitor General by President Barack Obama in January 2009

Elena Kagan was born in April 1960 in New York City. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1981. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Kagan wrote a senior thesis titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” In the “Acknowledgments” section of her work, she specifically thanked her brother Marc, “whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.” In the body of the thesis, Kagan wrote:

“In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter. Such a state of affairs cries out for explanation. Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?…

“Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.”

A week after Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in November 1980, Kagan contributed a piece to the Daily Princetonian, wherein she gave voice to her angst over the apparent demise of the Left.